Our basic image processing evolves and changes over time. This article documents our main processing steps. By its nature it will change over time and be updated.

We document this process to ensure that our readers know how we get certain results with our camera test images. We plan to notify our readers if we make major changes to this process (tools and techniques).

Last updated: 1/14/2009

Sample Image

For this sample we used an image shot with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Canon 100mm Macro at ISO 100.

If we want to further process an image we drag&drop the RAW file from Lightroom onto the RAW converter's dock icon.

Main RAW Processor: RAW Developer

RAW Developer is for now our main RAW converter (read our review). We only perform some essential and basic corrections in the raw converter and then do the final tuning in Photoshop. We have yet to find an image that would not need some final touches in Photoshop.

Here are the main steps we perform in RAW Developer:

Correct White Blance (WB)

Check and correct clipping (using EV and highlight recovery)

Tune shadows (using "Shadow Fine Tune" and "Curves")

Tune some initial saturation

Check for image artifacts

Use some standard image sharpening (may vary per camera)

Our final tuning is always in Photoshop (currently CS4). We have RAW Developer's Batch Processing setup that it processes the RAW file and opens the processed image into Photoshop.

100% pixel crop after processing in RAW Developer

Further Standard Tuning: Photoshop CS3/CS4

Correcting lens artifacts (optional)

Some images need CA and lens distortion corrections. We use now mainly the Photoshop "Lens Correction" tool.